Subtle

"The knife is in our teeth," says Doseone aka Adam Drucker, frontman of the six-piece Subtle. The band has had a bad run these last couple years, from the van crash that left keyboardist Dax Pierson a quadriplegic, to their robbery in Barcelona and the rocky reception to their excellent major label debut, For Hero: For Fool. In the wake of these trials, we recently spoke with Dose about his upcoming albums and projects, Dax Pierson's health, and how a cover of Shellac's "Prayer to God" wound up on Subtle's setlist this year. We also talked at length about the storyline and characters that run through the three Subtle LPs.

Doseone: Yell & Ice was what [2006 CD/DVD] Wishingbone was supposed to be. It's derived directly from the hip-hop ethos, where I'd go buy the maxi-single of my favorite rap song, and they'd have another version, and a completely new second verse.

Pitchfork: You mentioned you wanted to do that, except replace the whole song.

Doseone: Well, yeah. Like fuck it, make it fun for these artists that we're cold-calling, that we love. We're not paying, there's no money turned around on this record-- which I love-- and so it's like, I send this to you, you should take what inspires you and fuck it up a little bit, ruin it, make it pretty, send that to us, we will do the same, and just keep remaking things. What I like is that it expresses, quietly and in a mature way, how committed we are to the depths in our music. That we can go in and remake all these songs because we made a bunch of rights, and we could've made lefts. And they're just as valid.

Some of them were very simple, other things are complete revitalizations. Working with Tunde [Adebimpe] is wonderful, and we got to simply elaborate on what I'm doing, but working with Yoni [Wolf, aka Why?] on the first song ["Falling"] is like having the guy I wrote the song about on the song, singing the words that I rephrased.

The Chris Adams one ["Sinking Pinks"] is the only one that we didn't touch after he was done. He chops up all the music, and he's like, "I just can't sing any of the stuff you sent me." And I'm like, "Chris, you bitch, sing one line so I can cut it up, please!" That was literally the e-mail. I'm like, "Please just sing one line so it doesn't have to be all me." The next day he's like, "I'm sorry, I sang every word and I think the song is done." And we all listened to it, and we're like, "Chris is right."

We almost had Charles Hayward [of This Heat] on "Cutyell," but he's not a home recorder. So it was very difficult to get him in the lock groove of all us ProTools AIFF-sending youngsters.

Pitchfork: What does it take to make a remix work for you?

Doseone: The creativities, the openness, the give and take that it takes to share this truly personal thing, without any catches ... it's either there, or it's not. And so with Mike Patton and Tunde, it's fucking, that shit is just money man. I get in a room with those dudes, I can say "You look fat in that dress." Or I can say, "Oh my God, you just killed it!" And our egos never get between us.

[Patton and I] are starting plans to do a large chunk of music together, just the two of us. His style and talents are directly supplementary to mine. He goes in and in five minutes lays all the melodies for a record, and they're all different and varying, and it takes him quadruple the time to come up with one word for that entire record full of melodies. For me it's like, you give me fucking, "be-deep-it-tappa" and I'm like, "The radar's on the TV"-- it's like instant word-a-rama. So you know, it's really nice.

Pitchfork: You mentioned you wrote a breakup song. How are things with your fiancée?

Doseone: I came home from getting robbed in Europe, in Barcelona. Came home to my fiancée, and I simply kissed her on the cheek as I came through the door, and I knew something was up. And she was totally cheating on me, and making feelings with another dude. Doesn't tell me, makes this whole thing up about how she can't be with a musician, I am too dedicated-- she doesn't see how things can keep hitting me like lightning, how I can keep doing it. And I am like, "Oh my God, the person I want to be with is not saying that, she is not making a fork between what I do and who I am ..."

I am writing a breakup song about all this stuff. It is hard to be in a relationship and then be alone, and be left to that. She grew a dichotomy where an "us" was. And I returned to only the far side of that dichotomy. So it was terrible. And I felt pretty fucking abused.

I'm a really good person. I am not Mother Theresa, I do not spoon-feed Gerber to children in the great plains of Africa, but I really pick my people and I'm fucking true by 'em. Like, to the letter. It's just something I really believe in. If I'm not that, I'm not much. And so...and then it just kind of exploded.

That was my fucking December. That was it for me. But you know what? I did not want to kill myself. And I was so a suicide bunny at earlier points in my life. I got lines about it, and I fucking mean that shit. And then I was sitting there, all that shit happened to me, and I was not empty. I had two black eyes and I was completely not fucking empty.

On that tour [in Europe], while my lady is at home making feelings with this other dude, Patrick, our soundman, is playing his check-the-system songs. It's always "A New Kind of Water" by This Heat. So we rock out to it. And then he starts playing "Prayer to God", which I had never heard. I didn't listen to Shellac at all. So this is just in December, you know. He starts playing this song about this guy fucking killing his ex and the guy who came with her. And I get fucking chills, and I can't stop listening to it on this tour. And then I fucking realize when I get home, I knew! I fucking knew.

So then we covered that song. It was the only way I got through the tour we did after the breakup. "Guys, we've gotta do 'Prayer to God' or I'm not doing this fucking tour."

Pitchfork: So you're back in Oakland now?

Doseone: I am back in Oakland. And it's great, man. I hang out with Dax all the time. [For Hero: For Fool's] "Return of the Vein", which is "Cut Yell" on Yell & Ice-- that's all Dax, pretty much. He pretty much made that whole piece out of existing files, using Ableton Live. And he's fucking killing it. He is writing in MIDI notes, man. Exactly how Dax plays. He is hearing his sensibility. So he looks up and he's like, "Man, you know what? You've gotta put 'keyboard player' back on all the descriptions of what I do in this band!" 'Cause he's doing it.

Pitchfork: So his recovery is going well? Can he use his hands?

Doseone: No. Absolutely not. There's no change in motion. Dax is full-on quad. He can still twitch his thumb a little, [but] there's no more hope gifts. It's all hope that Dax has to conjure, at this point. He works hard for his days.

Pitchfork: But he can use Ableton Live.

Doseone: Well, yeah, man, it's fucking amazing. It's hard to describe, very easy to understand when you see it, but he has these braces that have cut-in-half pencils on them, and he types with them and uses this mouse that has single, double, triple-click and right-click all in separate buttons. So he basically cruises, dude, he's as quick as me. And he's just killing it. The hardest thing for him is that his day is completely regimented, with physical therapy in the morning, his alarm goes off four times a day and he has to take eleven pills the size of a pinkie toe, or even bigger than that. And then he has to be in bed at certain times, up at certain times, because of doctor's appointments, and he has to schedule his fun-- which he's actually resoundingly good at. He's having the most scheduled fun I've ever seen anyone have.

So basically, that's his hindrance at this point. It's just finding the honest-to-God just-spaced-out, just-focused-enough time to make music. Which is like a witching hour. Sometimes it's two a.m., sometimes two p.m. So he's working with that.

With the new record, we're on the slow, realistic track to maybe one day having him onstage in San Francisco and Los Angeles, playing with us. Which means he has to be killing it again live, up to his standards. He's the most amazing performer I've ever had the chance to be beside, so he doesn't want to feel like he's up there waiting for the hook.

Pitchfork: Tell me about the next Subtle LP.

Doseone: The Subtle record that's going to be out in the coming spring-- part three, as it were?-- is going to be the total explosion of this other world that Hour Hero Yes has fled into at the end of For Hero: For Fool. And just to clarify, A New White [the first part] is the coming of this unrapper poet bill-paying person, coming to his terms, his greater depths. Really having the entire nightmare. The entire epiphany, you know? And then that sets his reality loose a little. For Hero: For Fool picks up, and he starts having entire day terrors and fantasies and dreams that actually pick him up and put him somewhere. And it starts coming apart, and eventually at the end, when he affirms that he is not falling, he is something with trajectory-- that is aimed-- he dives through a door, and he drops the world for who he is, I suppose.

So it's all surrealist, i.e. it's an almanac of entries about this world that he goes into. Everything in the world is derived completely from the writings of A New White and For Hero: For Fool, i.e. every small experience, daydream, dayterror, that Hour Hero Yes goes through on those two records-- even the slightest poetic language-- was coming to him through the gauze of not knowing what he was getting himself into. I actually made all these notes, took all the language out of both records, and then built the almanac out of that. So what I decided to do-- since it's 20,000 words, there's no way I can ever press [a CD booklet]--is do a very large digital booklet that translates to this online website. You have in front of you an 11 x 17, a large image, and everything you click on starts to play the passages from the almanac. So the physical almanac will not exist in this world. Having this wealth of content allows me to make a whole 'nother world that you can get sucked into online.

And then the idea behind this is, Hour Hero Yes is a slave for these Ungods of this world that he falls into-- which is our world, of course, slightly metaphorized. In this world, he is kept by these two Ungods, the Revered Pitman and Dr. MoonorGun, and he is forced to dispose of all things beautiful, or [that have] meaning. They are more concerned with nervousness, apathy, you know, than ushering in a new era for mankind.

So he's their gimp, and he has to take all these things, turn it into prose, turn it into song, and he has to make these pop songs that they never turn off, basically. They have to be perfect pop songs. That's all they want. So the record itself is inside the almanac. The record is a spool of his perfect songs that he cuts for these gods. And they have to be these pop songs that they never want to turn off. At the same time, all of the words are from his almanac that he keeps, that's telling the truth about these gods.

Pitchfork: So they have these double meanings? And he's trying to help people break the Ungods' hold?

Doseone: Exactly. All in candy coating. So I wrote the whole almanac, and now I'm abstracting all the lyrics and song and rhyming things so that they're actually even coded a bit more.

Now the actual CD booklet is going to begin like the physical almanac, and then the pages will appear to be torn out, and it'll be exploding with all the art that you will see online. And so inside this booklet, you'll see the table of contents, which will have all 97 entries or whatever it is, in the map. And that'll be torn in half and explode into the art that depicts said entries. Because this record is supposed to be like, "Oh, I found it buried in the dirt." It's supposed to be a time capsule sort of thing.

Like I was saying, I'm anticipating people enjoying things through their teeth for the next 10 years. Like, why would people want to hear this awesome pop record and then go read the 20,000 words, in this day and age? I don't know.

Pitchfork: But it makes sense to make it accessible at the front, and then deeper and deeper so that people who want to fall down the rabbit hole can do that.

Doseone: And that is what I want. I mean, it's a kind of corny cathartic way to look at it, but if we're not out here feeding real people real substance, the well's gonna run fucking dry. I don't know who's going to make music for people for the next 10 years. Our appeal is with our artwork. It's not with fame, or fortune, popularity or exposure, it's with the work we're producing, you know? And even though times are slightly rugged, I think that over time, I would really hope that the future of music is not bands like the Strokes, where it's like, all these sons of Geffen owners that get together and do a band.

Pitchfork: So the almanac is like the diary that he's been keeping, but it's an almanac in the sense that it's keyed to the places he's going in this world?

Doseone: He keeps it, and it's secret, and he intends to release it. And he intends to release it through the cheese cloth of pop songs, that he makes for these gods, that all their skeptics listen to. He's trapped in this world, [where] Dr. MoonorGun manufactures "skeptics". And they run everything. They hollowed out the Hollywood hill that the letters are on, and they have this huge "Ape in the Absence of Fate institute" in it, and it's basically where they poke and prod and study over 50,000 apes to figure out where this particle called" the Not" came from, that sort of collects like CFCs in the Earth's atmosphere and creates large pools of "Nots" over major metropolitan areas. These concentrations of "Nots" are called "Nills", and they give birth to the un-children of "the terrible great nothing much."

The almanac itself is kept by him as secret. He actually keeps it in a hope chest in his cell, and he keeps Dylan Thomas' collected works on top of it, 'cause for some reason, the two gods can't move it? They can't deal with large amounts of good poetry. It's kryptonite to them. And then he keeps it, and it's all preserved, and secret for him. It details all the things he does and doesn't do, and then the interesting thing about it too is it's 20,000 words, and there's no "I." I've completely removed the first-person pronoun. So it's not really a diary. It's meant to be sans the self, which is what they do to Hour Hero Yes anyway. They make him a lens, and a vessel for things. So he doesn't even talk. He simply takes in and puts out. He's sort of like the ultimate poet, if ever there would be one.

And then the metaphor too for these Ungods is the editor of Spin magazine or what have you. These people that are like, "I better not even flinch for the pause or stop button."

Pitchfork: And they're making this pop music so that everyone in the world has to listen to it?

Doseone: Yes. The Headache Twins are the twin sons of the Reverend Pitman, and they are born out of the side of his neck after he gambles death down to his last anklebone. The Reverend Pitman wins, threads the anklebone, and puts the it around his neck, his neck splits open and he has two twin 18-year-old sons. Who then become the heads of music television, and run the commodified world and all their investments in it. And they have this thing called the Middleclass Haunt, which they want Hour Hero Yes to be the front for. Someone who is so honest that he gives off trust, and they will derive his truth, and Yes will usher it out onto the tounges and temper of men.

And then he sort of accepts it all willingly--

Pitchfork: Why does he accept it willingly?

Doseone: Well, the interesting thing about Yes is, he's dealing with the concept of freedom constantly. He is let loose, he dies, he goes through this door in his dream that he is pulled towards, and he can't wake up and breathe anymore, and on the other side of this dream he's immediately found by Dr. MoonorGun and Reverend Pitman, who saw him coming. It's all about the Terrible Great Nothing Much, which these gods serve. Which is the closed and complete circuit coming of apathy to the universe and fear, and absence. The absence in men, taking over the space they once occupied on Earth, entirely. And I've realized I totally ripped that off from The Neverending Story. (Laughs) I think it's even called the Big Nothing Monster, or something like that. [It's just "the Nothing"-- ed.] Which I thought was really great.

Now, the title For Hero: For Fool is actually the name of a board game, which is something that came to the Reverend Pitman in his sleep. That he and Dr. MoonorGun have been playing endlessly for about 100 years, because they knew one day that he would show up on the other side of this door, and they knew what his legacy would be. They knew he'd be on this raft, and they knew he'd have this blood ordeal with the popular world, and they knew he'd have all these things. And so they knew where he'd be, and they just didn't know when he'd be there. So For Hero: For Fool is actually, these titles came to him, and lined his experience while he was having them, and they were already a commodified board game in the world he was entering into.

I'm done with this "I Me Me I" breakup song, potency-of-one-person thing. I don't find it timeless. I find it perfect for certain moods, and they're moods I'm in less often the older I get. Now I have a deep desire to be involved, and for meaning and permanence, and I really want something that hits me again. Something that occurs in my life and I'm like, "Oh, that's why Buckminster Fuller says they should grow rice in China." Things that stick to the ribs.

What is interesting though is it became sort of Biblical. When you're doing large-scope metaphor. So the downside is I had to constantly be like, "Okay, I gotta get away from this hokey, preachy allegory, Biblical shit." Because that's too much, at points. But the cool thing about going toward that stuff, and zooming out 200x on what I'm writing about? Is that I'm writing about the world for the first time. I've never written about politics, never written about race, never written about the economy. I've never written about the shit that Bruce Springsteen and Bright Eyes write about, you know? I don't know where it fits into timeless music.

Pitchfork: Is there a resolution to this story at the end of the album, or online?

Doseone: This almanac is going to just be torn, and keep going. And I really like that. It leaves everyone completely open to it. And there will be references to resolution in the songs that are not actually in the writing. And vice versa. Is there an end to this record? [I've realized] where the definite middle is, and where the taper is. And this record does culminate in the appearance of this sort of hell hound of Reverend Pitman, which is called Consumption, and it has a wrecking ball body, and fists the size of four-story buildings, and it takes everything down... So it's sort of the coming of all apathy, back from man.

But then I worked in this whole bit - you know when your lights are out, and you stare at the dark long enough, and it sifts to all the grays and blues, yellows and greens that are actually there? So this is the concept behind this Terrible Great Nothing Much. Even when it goes so black that you can't see your own arm in front of your face, your rods and cones will bloat with that blackness, and eventually separate back into the million colors that are it.

Pitchfork: Is that a good thing?

Doseone: Yeah. That is a good thing. There will be something on the other side of this. Because just to explain a bit more, the Not particle and the Terrible Great Nothing Much, have been welling up over the years, since the first apes used a blade of grass as a tool on a comb of ants. The human mind started to make room for free time. And the arm became the only exit for the mind, in this world, as the mind developed. So you have war through the arm, and you have the various arts, all coming out through the arm. So as this develops, the free mind starts to expand, and nervousness enters the world, and fear of galactic proportions. And it has never had a place on this planet, and it starts to gang up on the human mind, and then eventually gang up on the space around it, and produce these CFCs. And then this new energy-- I sound like a hippie when I use that word-- but this new energy that exists on earth. It starts to kick up around wars, are the first thing. A Nill will develop, all these Nots will let off, and a Nill will start over a battlefield--

Pitchfork: A Nill?

Doseone: A Nill is like a hole in the ozone. It's a collection of Nots. I have all sorts of them in the almanac. Eventually they'll be over every mini-mall.

Pitchfork: What about "middle class"? What does that mean to you?

Doseone: I don't know if you knew this, but the entire world is designed to fit the six-foot tall man. Everything from airplane seats, to quarter slots, everything. All of it. So it's like this-- it's like the metric inch for all things animate, you know? And it's one of the many things that collected and fit right on top of this middle class-ocity thing... On For Hero: For Fool specifically, Yes is decidedly dealing with his space in this world. You are in the mill your father is in. It's not unlike the William Wrigley days, with Ellis Island and what my father is a step removed from. He's now the Senior Vice President at a toy company, but it's not very different than his papa who worked at the hat factory, fucking 19 hours a day, you know? And then here I am doing this obscene version of a very similar thing.

Pitchfork: In what sense?

Doseone: I'm hatmaking. I spend all these hours and I'm in the same grind where I'm going to wind up between these very-significant-but-similar-across-the-human-span poles of either a gigantic doctor bill, or a fortune from the doctor "dead in a week," or well-dressed daughters and preserving yourself, and carrying on the human condition, you know? So, to Yes this relates as a commitment to his vessel, and his time in these days, in the skin of these days. Time spent. So being sort of a soldier of middle class-dom, somehow being cut free by that. Being middle class means you'll never really be outside of the bracket you're in, is what that means to me.

This comes into the Headache Twins. They're also known as the heads of music television, and they run all the fear-enforcing factories that the Reverend Pitman and Dr. MoonorGun endorse in this world. Everything from MTV to Vice magazine to all these things. And they're behind everything. And not everything is ultimately divisive. They also are huge proponents of just plain absence. People wasting time. These are not like classic Satans here. They are about the Nill in man, this ability to shut off its potential and be like this living, thinking, breathing choice-wielding vacuum.

So the two Headache Twins basically devise and deal and try to pump these numbers up in the world. They have their Gallup poll of trying to pump up absence in the core of the person. Like, they have this thing called the Creative Child Press. If you expose a young, creative, able-minded child to copious amounts of fear, at an early age, before puberty, it will kick off the single most tonic fear extract known to man. And so they have this Creative Child Press. It looks like a giant laundry chute that's half flesh, half metal, and they put it on the kid's head, and he has like a VR helmet on that's just pumping in everything from the Hare Krishna death model to nuclear war and violent footage and all those concepts that are so ungraspable to you before you become used to their hard edges, and have to just accept them, you know? And so they do this, and they use this massive fear to power their entire factories. It doesn't always go right, but the fear yield from one child that's truly fucked up and pressed to death is just through the roof.

So they have all these elaborate things that are derivations on middle class. Yes is picked because he's middle class. There is a tune to his truth, that is tested by the places he's been, and in my own head I added it to being a poet. All the poets I really love are resoundingly middle class.

Then this whole killer motif comes in too, which really kicked up with our van being robbed, and then I kicked it into all the music very heavily. Especially the Yell & Ice material, where it's just like this diving principle property about carrying a knife in your teeth for what is right, for what is honest. In that regard, he is moreso that than he has any talent. Which is the cool thing. I feel like that's very much the people that I've surrounded myself with, we're all on a very similar boat. We were not picked out of the mire, ever, at any point. We maybe were in a few AP classes, or I had one feature in Spin, but -- in that game with the claw, that grabs the stuffed toys? The grabber thing? Not happening, to anyone I really know and love. It's happened to Danger Mouse, but it's not happening to anyone I love.

Something that used to get me very upset two years ago, when I'd call the publicist and she'd be like, "OK, what's the angle for this record?" And I'd be like, "Uh, it's art? And we do it with our whole lives? And if I had one day less of my life, this would be different?" I'm trying to explain how deeply wonderful that reasoning is, and what we're doing-- and she's just like, "Yeah-- well, can you get arrested? Or marry a man?"

What I really like about the space I'm in right now, as much as my constitution may be grappling with it, is I'm fucking hungry. Subtle, myself, my career, the accident, the art-- all of it has put me on a space right now where I'm fucking hungry again. Completely. Especially after the car accident, and getting robbed... There were a lot of "poor me" exits from that highway, to say the least. And we didn't take them.

Pitchfork: You say you're hungry now-- you've also said that on this new album, you feel pressured to make catchy pop songs.

Doseone: I have a childish perception of my world, and it's very healthy for the most part. However, there are certain things where I take people saying, "Make fucking a pop record man," I take that as a negative. Because it's something that seems really difficult for me to do. There have been things in my life that, when they were approached to me, someone was saying, "This solves it!" And I'm like, "You're fucking crazy! I do not want to do that, that's horrible." And so then I just started to approach the notion of us making fucking happy music that is based on everything I truly believe, think, and write creatively. And being confident in how I am live, and seeing these songs going somewhere that leads people back to this content, instead of hitting them with the content two-by-four.

So if the picture were to be painted that Subtle came back from their last adventure out into the world and were like, "It's just not poppy enough!" That's definitely not it. It's more like, the knife is in our teeth. And I'm going to put out a huge book that is exactly what I want to do, and it is well beyond the climate of today's music, and the word effort of my contemporaries. It's maybe too much, some would say. But the nice thing is to not put that too much on the music. To have the two vessels sit beside each other, and relate completely to those who are interested.

[For Hero: For Fool's] "The Mercury Craze" is actually the blueprint for this entire record. We entered that out there in the single world. It didn't do any of what singles would do. People enjoyed it, it's good music out there, but no limos to the door or any of that. And then like months later, Tom Brown [at Lex] has this Scroobius Pip song that goes fucking gold on digital downloads, you know? So, I'm sitting there going, "Okay, it's just a window you throw shit at. Whether we get through or not doesn't fucking matter." It also made me not as stressed about the notion of making bright music, and making something different in the song world. I was like, just because you make a pop song, it doesn't even matter. It's just music you make.

Pitchfork: Well, even the definition of a pop hook has gotten down to any little thing in the song that grabs your ear.

Doseone: Yeah. "Uhhhh!" "Uhhhhhh!"

Pitchfork: Exactly! It's some guy doing that.

Doseone: Yep. "Titty-witty. Titty-witty." I did realize the other day that this is the pace of my career. And I have to be fucking completely cool with that, and I need to put everything into this music because it's getting missed right now. When we play a 600 person venue, there's 300 people. When we play a 300-person venue, there's 210.

So, it's getting missed. And I want to make sure that it is there to be splayed out for everyone when I'm not there to do Pitchfork features. You know what I mean? And I want it to be deep, and I want it to be translatable in a million separate human mindwaves.